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by Leonard Heldreth

 

An eye on imperfections
No film is perfect; each has virtues and flaws. The films this month tend to be extreme in their strengths or weaknesses, often polarizing reviewers and generating ongoing arguments. Each has some astonishingly good scenes, played off against some serious weaknesses. Their successes are big, but so are their problems.

 

Caché
French director Michael Haneke works at getting under the viewer’s skin, and in my case he was successful, probably in exactly the negative way that he desires. His highly regarded film of a few years ago, The Piano Teacher, was a tedious portrait of a mentally disturbed person.
In Caché (Hidden), he sets out to frustrate the viewer’s expectations, and once again, he succeeds admirably. The problem is that he expects his approach to provide new intellectual insights, yet for this viewer it provides only intellectual gymnastics and tedium. However, many reviewers and critics gave the film a top rating.
The film opens with an establishing shot of a French suburban street that goes on and on and on until the picture breaks up and we realize we are watching a film of a videotape of a suburban street, a videotape that someone has made and sent to a French couple to illustrate to them that he (or she) can make a film of their house whenever he wants to. The shot is even longer than that sentence.
More videotapes follow, accompanied by unskilled drawings of a boy with blood coming from his mouth. The couple go to the police, but the police will do nothing until someone threatens the family, including the teen-aged son. The father, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), thinks he knows who the voyeur and the motive might be, but when he confronts the individual, unexpected violence erupts.
While there are a number of possibilities for the identity and motivation of the person making the videotapes, no answers are given, and at the end of the film little is explained, although some possibilities are illustrated, possibilities that are expanded radically by the very last shot of the film.
While the credits are running, check the upper left corner of the picture. I am not giving anything away because the director says that what you see in this last shot may explain things or it may not. It’s your problem to figure out.
Haneke clearly is manipulating the thriller genre, and some reviewers cited Hitchcock, but he’s really the opposite of Hitchcock—someone who looks down on the thriller genre and uses it only to catch the viewer’s attention. He says in an interview that the plot is not important, the focus must be on the family’s reaction. But when Hitchcock wanted this same effect, in Vertigo, for example, he revealed the secret of Kim Novak’s impersonation, leaving the audience free to focus on Scotty’s reaction.
Haneke also acknowledges that his focus is on guilt—the guilt the father feels over something he did when he was six years old. The question of whether a middle-aged man should feel excruciating guilt over something he did at six is another complication.
He also points out that the father’s guilt is an allegory for France’s guilt over the way it treated many Algerians in the ’60s and then hushed up what had happened (hence the title). He sees France’s behavior as parallel to that of all colonial powers, so the film becomes an even broader allegory. The bottom line is that if individuals or countries looks hard enough, something bad has occurred for which they should feel responsible.
Few would argue with his basic thesis, but ways of dealing with that guilt and compensating for those actions have been discussed openly and in much detail for more than a hundred years. The United States has had an ongoing discussion about its treatment of Native Americans and African Americans as well as recent discussions about immigrant workers from Mexico.
But by the time Haneke confuses the moral issues by raising too many other questions—do we behave differently while under observation, can one distinguish what happens vs. what people remember or make up, does reality exist or are there just multiple points of view, did the wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) have an affair or is the son hallucinating, etc.—the moral questions are almost lost.
On the positive side, the acting is superb throughout, Haneke controls his camera obsessively, and, in between long stretches of irritation, the film raises a number of interesting questions. But be forewarned: the film is an exercise in frustration, and that apparently was exactly what the director wanted.
It is in French with very readable English subtitles or dubbed on DVD. Top

 

Marilyn Hotchkiss Dancing Class and Charm School
In 1990, Randall Miller presented a short film with a title nearly identical to the current one; the short film was successful and launched him on a career of TV and mainstream films. He and his wife, the producer and co-author, apparently used their home equity to finance this production, which uses footage from the original film as flashbacks for a story set in the present time.
The problem is in making the various strands in the new script fit together and fit with the previous footage, a problem not always solved successfully.
In the film, a third-generation baker named Frank Keane (Robert Carlyle) arrives at the scene of an accident involving Steve Mills (John Goodman) and calls 911; the paramedics urge him to keep Mills talking until they get there, and he does, and then they ask him to accompany them in the ambulance and continue talking to Mills.
The story Mills tells is the flashback story of how he attended Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School and met a girl there. He and the girl agreed to meet again on the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium at the Hotchkiss dance class, and Mills was on the way there when he crashed. Of course, he asks Keane to go in his place, and the rest of the film is about what Keane finds when he gets there.
Keane is a widower whose wife committed suicide, and he attends a support group meeting once a week. When Keane begins improving (he disposes of his wife’s things), the other members of the group show up at the Hotchkiss school.
Add in Marisa Tomei as Meredith, the girl that Keane falls in love with; put Mary Steenburgen in as Marianne Hotchkiss, rigid daughter of the school’s founder; insert Donnie Wahlberg as a hip-wagging dancer, and toss in Danny Devito for a two-minute or less bit part, and you have a curious movie.
All of these people and their stories have to be shoehorned into the part of the movie set in the present without doing damage to the original movie set over thirty years before.
The characters are uniformly interesting, and the cast is excellent, but none of the characters get much development. The cause of Keane’s wife’s suicide is never explored. Meredith has an artificial leg, but how she got that way or what effect it has on her is never shown—it just appears in two scenes.
Hotchkiss is a fascinating character as Steenburgen plays her, but again, we don’t know why she is the way she is or exactly what triggers her to begin changing. And how did Miller take the very serious step that took him away for thirty years? Is it important that Keane is a third-generation baker? (There is just enough of a parallel between a girl with a black eye today and one in the past to raise expectations that other parts should fit together.)
The happy ending for part of the characters is sharply offset by the outcome of the story of Miller trying to meet the girl from his past, part of which can be anticipated and part of which cannot.
Overall, the film is a curious one, with some very touching scenes and some jarring ones. Parts of it are completely predictable and other parts are surprisingly original. But because of the good scenes, its positive themes and the superb acting, it’s worth watching. Top

 

Don’t Come Knocking
German director Wim Wenders has an uneven track record. He has created clear masterpieces like Wings of Desire and its sequel, or his earlier work with Sam Shepard, Paris, Texas. I’ve always liked Wenders’ work, even the films before his big successes as well as the smaller recent ones, such as The American Friend or Million Dollar Hotel.
Wenders prides himself on his eccentricity and making films his way, although he attracts big names to his productions (such as getting Bono to do the music for Million Dollar Hotel). Shepherd, of course, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love) as well as a fine actor (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff). Shepard and Wenders had collaborated on Paris, Texas and, recently, over the course of six years, they developed a script and created Don’t Come Knocking.
Howard Spence (Shepard) is a Western movie star whose star is declining; his current film, the aptly named Phantom of the West, is in production in Utah (George Kennedy plays the director) with some scenes in Arches National Park.
Howard gets on his horse one day and rides off, right off the movie set and into hiding. He goes to Elko, where his mother (Eva Marie Saint) lives, and hides there briefly until his mother tells him about an illegitimate child he has. He goes to Butte (Montana) in search of the mother, Doreen (Jessica Lange), and the now-grown boy, Earl (Gabriel Mann). He also encounters Sky (Sarah Polley), a daughter he never knew he had.
In the meantime, an insurance agent named Sutter (Tim Roth) is trying to track him down and drag him back to the set to finish the movie. The focus is on Howard trying to make some sense of the mess he has made of his life and trying to reconcile with Doreen and his children, but Doreen says he’s too much of a coward to ever stay around and face the consequences of his actions.
Like most of Shepard’s writing, the film deals with a dysfunctional family situation, and the dialogue is superb.
Reviewers both praised and damned the movie. The biggest objections were that it was not as good as Paris, Texas. Howard’s character and motivations were not developed and the film didn’t have much of an ending. The scene where Howard sits overnight on a couch in the middle of a street was cited as totally unrealistic. On the positive side, they liked the cinematography and the music, which was supervised by T Bone Burnett.
This reviewer would add in the pleasures of the dialogue, Wenders’ ability to capture a sense of place and excellent acting by everyone involved. Shepard is fine, Lange is excellent in a role that swings between humor and frustration (Shepard says the film is a comedy), Polley has an angelic quality which fits with her name, and despite having the “message” speech, she makes the part believable. Mann and Fairuza Balk (as his girlfriend Amber) make their alienated roles work effectively. Eva Marie Saint is excellent.
Altogether, Don’t Come Knocking is an original film and is recommended especially for those who like Wenders’ and Shepard’s previous work. Top

 

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, was written by Guillermo Arriaga, the author of the screenplays for Amores Perros and 21 Grams. Like Don’t Come Knocking, it is set in the modern West, complete with helicopters; it stars a man who looks and acts like a Western icon; it features an old man who aids the hero; it has to do with family and keeping obligations; and it could be set nowhere except the American West.
Unlike the previous film, its location is the U.S.-Mexican border, it moves back in time as it crosses the border, and it deals with racism, not a man’s attempt to reconstruct his past.
Melquiades Estrada is an illegal immigrant working as a cowhand with Pete Perkins (Jones). Estrada shoots at a coyote harassing a goat farm, and Mike Norton (Barry Pepper), a nearby border agent, thinks he is being shot at, returns the fire, and kills Estrada. When he sees what he has done, he hides the body and runs away.
Estrada’s body is found, and after a sham investigation and cover-up, is buried in the local cemetery. Perkins, finding out who killed Estrada, kidnaps the border guard, makes him dig up Estrada’s body, and the two men and the corpse set out for Mexico to bury the dead man in his hometown. Perkins had promised to do that, and he is determined to see it through, despite the local sheriff and the border patrol in pursuit.
The film follows their subsequent adventures, attempts to preserve the corpse and their surprise at what they find in Mexico.
Jones, looking like a grizzled old prospector, not only directs with a skilled hand, but brings believability to a character with an obsession (one reviewer labeled him “crazy”). The rest of the cast is fine, with Dwight Yoakam especially good as the red-neck Sheriff Frank Belmont, who shares Rachel (nicely played by Melissa Leo) with Perkins, her husband, and an unknown number of others.
Levon Helm, former member of “The Band” and the father in Coal Miner’s Daughter, is excellent as an old blind man who begs to be shot so that he won’t have to commit suicide when his food runs out. Pepper is fine as Mike Norton in a role that tends toward the stereotypical, and January Jones has a short but effective part as Norton’s wife before she hops on a bus and disappears.
In the first half of the film, Guillermo Arriaga uses the same kind of overlapping flashback structure that he used in his two previous features, and while it worked in those, it is unnecessarily confusing here. How Estrada dies is fairly simple and could be told in one sequence, rather than three or four flashbacks that tell various parts of the story. Once the men start to Mexico, the film settles into the logic of the journey and follows a simple narrative line. Arriaga also used coincidences to strong effect in the earlier films, but in this film the coincidences seem far-fetched and almost unnecessary—Estrada’s afternoon of sex with Norton’s wife (virtually nothing is made of the coincidence), and Norton’s being brought to the house in Mexico of a woman he had struck when she was trying to cross the border. Pepper’s redemption is a little too pat, perhaps because his character is not developed enough for the audience to understand him. We know more about Estrada, who dies early in the film, than about Norton.
Despite these problems, the film succeeds because of its acting, its timely subject matter and its revamping of the traditional Western formula. The photographer is Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission), and the Old West with its desert in bloom has never looked better. All of these qualities make it very much worth seeing, and many reviewers gave it their highest rating. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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